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Analyses critically the roles of several national pro-democracy groups in the 1990s, and their attempts to mobilize civil society to resist. Compares their strategies and activities and their role in promoting a democratic transition.

Contends that the revolution was truly unpredictable by critiquing five sets of retrospective ‘explanations’. Includes essay on available source material.

A professor of community health tells the stories of 80 gay, bisexual and transgender activists and volunteers in Chicago and San Francisco.

This wide-ranging collection analyzes the status and progress of women both in a national context and collectively on a global scale, as a powerful social force in a rapidly evolving world. The countries studied―China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Egypt, Cameroon, South Africa, Italy, France, Brazil, Belize, Mexico, and the United States―represent a cross-section of economic conditions, cultural and religious traditions, political realities, and social contexts that shape women’s lives, challenges, and opportunities. Psychological and human rights perspectives highlight worldwide goals for equality and empowerment, with implications for today’s girls as they become the next generation of women. Women’s lived experience is compared and contrasted in such critical areas as: home and work; physical, medical, and psychological issues; safety and violence; sexual and reproductive concerns; political participation and status under the law; impact of technology and globalism; country-specific topics.

This book by a landscape architect explores how local solutions to particular environmental problems, often adopted in remote parts of the planet by indigenous peoples, have a much wider relevance today, and might be alternatives to western technological solutions that can have their own destructive implications. (TEK here means traditional ecological knowledge.) Watson has compiled 18 case studies, split into the separate categories of mountains, forests, deserts and wetlands, based on 10 years of travelling and interviewing anthropologists and scientists as well as indigenous peoples. She records, for example, how traditional methods of rice growing on hill slopes in Bali have proved more lastingly productive than the 1970s 'Green Revolution' based on pesticides and fertiliser, which in a few seasons led to declining yield, a degraded soil and return of the pests.

Drawing on newly released Party and Stasi archives, Maier analyses the 40 years of East German history, and charts both the growth of dissent (for example the autonomous peace campaigns and youth culture) in the 1980s, and the systemic decline of the regime due to economic crisis and corruption at the top. See also: Maier, ‘Civil Resistance and Civil Society: Lessons from the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic in 1989’, in Timothy Garton Ash, Adam Roberts, Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent Action from Gandhi to the Present (A. 1.b. Strategic Theory, Dynamics, Methods and Movements) , pp. 260-76.

Then foreign minister addresses the question ‘how did a 100% Muslim country, acting in tandem with the international community, … peacefully turn centuries of autocratic rule into something resembling a functioning liberal democracy?’

EU ‘neighbourhood plans’ agreed with neighbouring states link economic cooperation with human rights and democratization. This report includes case studies of how this has been implemented - or not - in Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon, Ukraine, Belarus and Azerbaijan. FRIDE has published a range of reports and policy briefs - all available online - with critical analyses of ‘democracy promotion’, especially by the European Union and its members, including in the context of the ‘Arab Spring’.

Advocates a ‘civic unionism’ which acknowledges both the Britishness and Irishness of Northern Ireland. To quote from the Preface it ‘accommodates questions of cultural identity, liberal emphases on the entitlements of individuals and a substantive understanding of politics in which the practice of dialogue is central’.